Katinka Bock

Couler un tas de pierres

2007

Katinka Bock, Couler un tas de pierres, 2007. Video.

«I will put two heavy stones in my jacket pockets that way my body will sink deep like a deflated truck tire, no one will notice», this excerpt from “Quay West” by Koltès could echo the story depicted by Katinka Bock: the shipwreck of a small boat full of stones. The grain of the image and the framing evoke distant times, maybe the origins of cinema and the footage of the Lumière brothers. The operator’s gaze creates a landscape undetermined in space and time. An encounter between density and liquid: the effect produced is strange and paradoxical since the rocks are floating, temporarily denying gravity. It is also an aesthetic study of the liquid and the mineral, a confrontation between the fluid and the rough, a combination of the wave and the shape.

The city, the landscape and the exhibition space are Katinka Bock's favored playgrounds. Her installations, sculptures, films and photographs question the spaces of action and representation, in their daily and political use, through the prism of aesthetics and poetry. Katinka Bock makes changes to the landscape. In « Sol d'incertitude » (2006) the artist removes (Parisian cobblestones), quotes (a history of mobility), and modifies (tar coating). These actions function as small rituals. « Das Konservat » (2003), a 3 meter high wooden fence enclosing 2500 square meters of grass, acts like a cutting in the landscape, reminiscent perhaps of the 'temenos' (in Ancient Greece, sacred space in open air dedicated to a god).
Although Bock's objects are visually mute, they tell stories. For the exhibition « Kanon » (La Synagogue de Delme, 2008), a drama of materials occurred; the sculptures were transformed into still lives, with a fragile monumentality.
Katika Bock was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1976. She lives and works in Paris and Berlin.